Monday, September 26, 2011

Julie and Jake were married at Graystone Mansion, which is a gorgeous park setting. Greystone Mansion has a fascinating history. It was originally built by an oil tycoon named Doheny in the early 1920s, for his son and his son's wife. The young couple had only lived in it for four months when the son was killed in a murder-suicide with his male assistant. Eventually the estate was purchased by the City of Beverly Hills. It is now a public park and the mansion is frequently used for filming movies and television shows such as Batman and Robin, SpiderMan III and most recently The Social Network.

The weather was perfect and Julie was a beautiful bride. It was great to see Rick's family, some who we haven't seen for years. Here are some pictures, wish I had more but we had to leave before the cake cutting to get back home...

I am sooooo behind in blogging so I thought I better post the latest before I get further behind. I'll have to catch up with the other "stuff" later.

This weekend we drove up to California to go to Rick's cousin, Julie's wedding. We decided that it would be fun to surprise the kids with a day at Disney the day before the wedding. So we left as soon as I was done teaching Thursday night. Got to the hotel around midnight. Rick and I packed the kids Disney shirts so they would have the appropriate clothing for the day. Rick and I had our Disney shirt on, I gave Skyler his Disney shirt to wear and then Rick asked Elizabeth that should wear a Disney shirt since we all had ours on. She said, I didn't pack mine and he said, well you are in luck we did! She thought that was weird but went ahead and changed into it.

To make this day a little more fun and different we decided to participate in what is called The Disney Challenge which is basically a scavenger hunt at Disneyland. We would be in the beginners group which meant that we had until noon to get all our answers in. I came up with our team name, The Fantastic Four and because we didn't have time to make t-shirts I made buttons for us to wear instead. So Rick then said to Elizabeth after she changed into her shirt that I had made matching buttons (now remember they still don't know what is going on). She said "Really?" (sarcastic tone- she still hasn't caught on at this point) and told us she was not going to wear it. He then said those who wear it gets one of these (handing out a Disneyland ticket). It was great! So we then explained that we were going to Disney and going on a scavenger hunt. Which was fun. We didn't win but we learned a lot of fun things about Disneyland in the process.

Here is pictures of our Disney Day...

Trying to decipher the Mayan language- hardest part of the scavenger hunt!